Mark Abbott Elected to National Soccer Hall of Fame
Sometimes you don’t need a fancy office with the latest tech to put together the details of a ground-breaking idea.
Sometimes all you need is a good solid plan, a clear vision and someone willing to implement it.
When a young attorney named Mark Abbott was tasked to put together a plan for a fledgling Major League Soccer in 1993, he accomplished it in the most modest of rooms: a fire closet in an office building in Century City, Calif.
A fire closet with no windows.
“It’s not a metaphor,” Abbott told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2022. “I had this little, tiny desk and a folding chair.”
As the first employee of MLS, Abbott was trying to create a national soccer league that would be sustainable for decades to come. He did, and then some.
Abbott wound up wearing several hats during his MLS tenure, serving as vice president, chief operating officer, president and finally as deputy commissioner before stepping down after the 2022 season.
“It is not possible to summarize in a memo Mark’s contributions to the launch and growth of MLS and the building of the sport of soccer in North America,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber wrote in a memo to the league’s board of governors in 2021 when Abbott announced his decision to step away.
“I know I speak for everyone when I say how much he will be missed and how fortunate we have all been to work with a colleague as smart, thoughtful, balanced and singularly dedicated to the best interest of our league.”
For his contributions to the growth of soccer in the United States, Abbott will be inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Frisco, Texas, on May 3, 2025. He was voted in from the Builder Ballot.
For a good portion of his career, Abbott worked behind the scenes, doing what was needed to ensure the league’s vitality and success. What started out as a 10-team circuit has blossomed into a 29-team league, with San Diego poised to make it 30 in 2025.
“Mark’s fingerprints are on every major transaction and every major decision that’s been made in the history of the league,” said Dan Beckerman, president of Anschutz Entertainment Group, in a 2022 interview with the Sports Business Journal.
“We’ve got to decapitate him and freeze his head so we’ll have the history of the league,” former U.S. Soccer President Alan Rothenberg said in the same article.
Before becoming the architect of a new soccer league, Abbott already had a background in the sport. His father Fred, an Englishman, was hired as an optical engineer for 3M after moving to the Minneapolis suburbs. A couple of years later, Maplewood, Minn. officials asked him to start a parks soccer program.
“It was on the rise, affordable, anybody can play it, and my father had an English accent,” Mark Abbott told the Tribune.
Then 10 years old, Mark signed up to play, along with 17 players. His sister, Heather played as well. Fred Abbott played an important role in helping youth soccer grow in Maplewood, Oakdale and North Saint Paul through the Northeast Soccer Association.
Prior to the 2022 MLS All-Star Game in Saint Paul, Minn., the league honored Mark Abbott’s decades of work by rededicating Fred Abbott Field in his father’s memory at Hazelwood Park in Maplewood.
His father “would have beamed with pride and amazement, as I do, on the growth in soccer all over this country, and he would have been amazed, particularly with what has happened here in Minnesota,” Abbott told the Pioneer Press.
“When we were kids, it was, ‘What is soccer?’” Mark’s sister Heather told the newspaper. “Now to have my brother be part of the reason that people know what soccer is in the United States, to us, is amazing.”
Abbott graduated from Tartan High School in 1982, earning a degree from Georgetown University and then a law degree from University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he was hired by the Latham & Watkins law firm in Century City, Calif.
When FIFA awarded the 1994 FIFA World Cup to the United States in 1988, its No. 1 criteria was to establish a first division league to promote the sport. The U.S. hadn’t had one since the original North American Soccer League folded after the 1984 season.
Rothenberg, who held dual roles at the time as the U.S. World Cup Organizing Committee head and U.S. Soccer president, didn’t start zeroing in on the league until 1993.
While working as a third-year associate attorney at Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles, Abbott served under Rothenberg, who was a senior partner in the firm. He overhead Rothenberg on a speakerphone commenting that he needed someone to help build a business plan for a new pro soccer league.
“I ran into Rothenberg’s office and said, ‘I’ll do it,’” Abbott told the Sports Business Journal. “And he said, ‘You’ll do what?’”
Abbott told Rothenberg that he had never written a business plan. Yet, he got the job.
“I knew he was great, and I knew he loved soccer,” Rothenberg told SBJ. “And so next thing you knew he came to work on our incipient project that hadn’t even been formed formally yet.”
Ivan Gazidis, who moved from England to Los Angeles, was brought on to help, working nearby in a hallway. (Gazidis, formerly CEO of A.C. Milan and MLS deputy commissioner, is president of Saint-Etienne in French Ligue 1 and Kilmer Sports Ventures.)
“That basic idea came from Alan, and my job was to bring it to life,” Abbott told Reuters in 2020.
A 69-page plan was put together, as the league was unveiled at the FIFA World Cup draw in Las Vegas on Dec. 17, 1993.
“At that time there was skepticism about whether the U.S. and ultimately Canada would support a professional league,” Abbott told Reuters. “Clearly we had a lot of optimism that it would work but there were a lot of people that needed to be convinced. There were a lot of pieces that needed to come into place, and at times that looked daunting.
“But it was very clear to all of us that were involved in the startup that there was such a tremendous opportunity here that if we were able to assemble the right mix of all those different elements we ultimately would be successful.”
The league was supposed to kick off in 1995, but it was delayed for a year. Like Abbott’s fire closet, MLS had humble beginnings. The league boasted 10 teams: D.C. United, Columbus Crew, New England Revolution, New York/New Jersey MetroStars and Tampa Bay Mutiny in the Eastern Conference, and the Colorado Rapids, Dallas Burn, Kansas City Wiz, Los Angeles Galaxy and San Jose Clash in the Western Conference.
Abbott worked diligently behind the scenes on developments, problems and challenges that attracted headlines, but not necessarily attention to himself.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing. In 2001, the league had contracted from 12 teams to 10 and was in danger of folding. Abbott came up with a plan for the remaining owners to invest more money to keep MLS afloat.
“Mark went from helping coordinate the lawyers who were going to take the league through bankruptcy to helping us chart a new path with the creation of Soccer United Marketing and reorganizing the league so that we no longer had league-operated teams,” Clark Hunt, FC Dallas co-owner with brother Dan, told SBJ. “It was his steady hand that helped guide us through that.”
“It’s not always been a smooth road,” Abbott told Reuters. ”After the euphoria of the initial startup it was clear that we needed to analyze our business and our business strategy.”
With the league stabilized, Abbott helped in other areas. He and Garber flew to Salzburg, Austria, twice to meet with Dietrich Mateschitz, before the Red Bull owner purchased the MetroStars in 2006 and renamed the club the New York Red Bulls.
In 2022, Abbott decided to leave MLS to take on new challenges.
In September 2023, Abbott returned to Georgetown University, along with his wife, to be a distinguished executive-in-residence. His wife Mareta Hamre joined the school’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs as a research fellow. Both appointments were for one year. The couple met at the Berkeley Law School, where he served as the managing editor and she as the notes editor for the California Law Review.
Abbott, 60, was gratified with the way MLS and the sport have grown over the past three decades.
“It’s been an unbelievable opportunity to have been involved with something from the very start,” he told SportsProMedia.com in 2022. “When you’re 28 years old, you can’t think of what something’s going to look like 30 years [later], it’s impossible to think of those timescales. But to have seen what has happened over this period of time and to see the continued opportunity for growth, I couldn’t be more optimistic about what’s going to happen with our league in — forget 30 years — the next five years.
“I’m immensely proud of that. And just grateful to have been given this opportunity to be part of it.”
He had no doubts that soccer would soar to new heights.
“I believed that this would be a major league in this country, which it has become, and all of the things that go along with that in terms of value and relevance and interest and passion and connection,” Abbott told SBJ. “This is what I imagined.”